In August 1969, Charlie Myers and his older brother loaded his Studebaker Lark with sleeping bags and a cooler and drove north from Baltimore to the rural town of Bethel, N.Y.

The brothers were hoping to attend a big going-away party before shipping out to serve in the U.S. Army in Vietnam.

They found one on Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, 43 miles southwest of the town of Woodstock.

The two were among the half-million concert-goers who attended the Woodstock music festival on Aug. 15-18, 1969.

This month marks the 40th anniversary.

“All these years later, it is a time that is frozen in my mind, a time when people of all races, creeds and ages got along,” said Myers, 58, now a retired oil worker living in San Bernardino.

Woodstock, billed as an Aquarian Exposition, featured 32 of the best-known musicians of the day performing for thousands of concert-goers.

Among those delighting the crowd on that rainy weekend were Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane.

Although it was held at a time when thousands of young men were dying in Vietnam and racial unrest roiled the U.S., there were no acts of violence at the concert.

There were births, two recorded deaths, bad weather, food shortages and poor sanitation.

But for the most part it was four days when everything from food to drugs and good loving was shared.

Since then, it has been described as the greatest concert of all time, a counter-cultural mini-nation and successful experiment in peace and community by those who were there and those who have written about it or preserved it on film.

It began with a huge traffic jam that Herb Reitsam, 67, a retired electrician from Highland, remembers being stuck in for hours.

“I was a working-class man, not a hippy, and on the spur of the moment we decided to head out on Route 17 to go camping in the Catskills,” he said. “We got caught up in a terrible traffic jam, and everywhere I looked there were Volkswagen buses.

“I didn’t know there was something going on until we heard on the radio there was some kind of music festival.”

His next memory was going to church on Sunday and praying for all the young people caught up in the situation.

One of those people was Barry Last, 63, of Redlands.

Last, now a teacher at Wilmer Amina Carter High School in Rialto, hitchhiked to the concert with friends from Virginia, arriving at the festival the day before it started.

He stayed for the next three days at an event he describes as a place where not everything was bad and not everything was good.

The good was the different performances and the feeling of trust shared by those who were there.

“People were willing to help each other,” he said. “It’s not like nowadays when people are more suspicious.”

To this day, his fondest memory is that thousands of people could get together for a concert and not kill each other.

Myers, who just followed the guy in front of him to get to the festival, recalled that there was no fighting, stealing, violence or even drinking.

“It was just people frying on acid (LSD) and smoking weed, like one big party,” he said.

When it started raining, he and his brother covered up under sheets of plastic and started screaming “no rain, no rain.”

He remembers, too, coming across a girl having a baby, people overdosing on drugs and dealing with inadequate restroom facilities.

And then there was the music.

“It came in waves from towers of speakers 40 to 50 feet tall,” Myers said. “We would pass out with the music blaring and wake up with the music playing. Jimi Hendrix and Joe Cocker had to be the best of them all.”

After Woodstock, Myers was shipped to Vietnam and into the heart of battle.

Some of the good feelings he said he carried from Woodstock helped him cope when he saw combat.

“I got to see the ugly side of humanity in war. People didn’t want to get to know you because you might end up dead,” he said. “It was the exact opposite from Woodstock.”

Bruce Michael, 61, of Moreno Valley had recently returned from a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam when he hooked up with some friends and drove to the festival in an old station wagon.

“We heard on the radio that the walls were already knocked down and it was free. And we literally parked on the New York State Thruway and walked to the festival,” said Michael, a retired mechanic. “We got there early and when the sun came up on Friday, we turned around and saw thousands of people sitting behind us.

“The feeling was like a young kid going to Disneyland for the first time – overwhelming and awesome.”

When it rained, he and friends slept in an old Pepsi truck that was stuck in a ditch.

Drugs were ubiquitous. They had a pipe that people would fill with marijuana, hashish, whatever, when they walked by, he said.

Michael said he remembers laughing at the warning not to do the brown acid and seeing people flipping out in medical tents.

And then there was the music.

“It was good and loud, not distorted,” Michael said. “And although I really didn’t notice what I was living through at the time, it was as a whole an anti-war concert, with the protest songs sung by Country Joe and the Fish and Joan Baez.”

Michael said he believes the lessons learned at the four days of peace and music have been lost today.

“The message back then wasn’t maim, mistreat or disrespect. It was peace and love, it really was,” he said. “If we were to try to recapture that today we couldn’t because this country has gone downhill with greed.”

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